Saturday, September 15, 2012

Interview: SF Gate

Freddie Quell, the character Joaquin Phoenix plays in Paul Thomas Anderson's
epic drama "The Master," is a World War II veteran with a fierce case
of post-traumatic stress and an unquenchable thirst. He is a master
mixologist of ingredients that were never meant to be blended together
or imbibed, a bootlegger manufacturing rotgut out of pure poison.

"So
much of it is borderline ridiculous," laughs Anderson during a chat at
the Toronto International Film Festival the afternoon after "The Master"
made its Canadian debut. "We'd read these stories about guys who
thought somehow that they could pour pure alcohol into the bread and
sort of squeeze it out and that would somehow make it not tear your
stomach apart, and I thought, 'That's great! I've got to get that in the
film.' And then when you really dig underneath it, basically, the real
story is, 'Yeah, we knew idiots that would do that, and those were the
guys that tore their stomachs apart, that were s-ing for days and weeks
after that.'"
"You have to imagine Freddie as like a superhero character who can actually do that and survive."

Freddie's
mix mastery, and the fact that he's a stowaway on a voyage from San
Francisco through the Panama Canal to New York that Philip Seymour Hoffman's L. Ron Hubbard-like Lancaster Dodd
has organized, are what initially piques Dodd's curiosity, setting into
motion an intense relationship between the two men as Dodd applies his
"process" (akin to Scientology auditing) to Freddie in a bid to help him
conquer his inner demons.

Anderson
returns to filmmaking five years after his critically acclaimed "There
Will Be Blood" as a conquering hero. At the Venice Film Festival, "The
Master" came away with the Volpi Cup acting prize shared by Phoenix and
Hoffman and the Silver Lion for best director. Early screenings have
been packed. An August benefit screening for the Film Foundation at San Francisco's Castro Theatre (a venue Anderson holds dear) sold out the 1,400-seat movie palace.

For the gorgeous 70mm film, which shot largely at locations in the Bay
Area, including San Francisco, Crockett, Berkeley and particularly
Vallejo's decommissioned Mare Island shipyard, this is only the
beginning of what looks to be a busy awards season, a happy result for a
film that began with Anderson slowly developing the character who
became Freddie Quell.

"I had a character, a different character,"
Anderson says. "He had the same last name, Quell - I'd been writing
stuff for that character for a long time. Some of the things were doing John Steinbeck's
life, like stories of him leaving Stanford and going to work in the
beet fields and blah, blah, blah. I had a lot of great stories from
that. I had some stories with Jason Robards. I just like collections of things."

"I
was kind of like in search of a story, in search of a kind of venue,"
he continues. "I had a situation where he snuck on a boat - he ended up
on some boat that he didn't belong on - I had variations on that. And
there was this master of ceremonies who wondered, 'Why are you on
my boat?'

'Messing around'

"It
was all kind of vague like that - I was just sort of messing around
writing, and then about four or five years ago, I started becoming more
specific, 'What is this? Where are these pieces going?'"

To
Freddie's story, he married what became Lancaster Dodd's in what he
describes as a case of reverse engineering. As a writing exercise at one
point, Anderson filled out a Scientology personality test. The
Scientology part was not the point - the exercise was to answer the
test's questions as a character. When he was done with it, he recognized
the character.

"I was obviously answering in the voice of a
character that was similar to Freddie, so I had that with no intentions
and no place to go," he says, but then his fascination with Scientology
founder Hubbard opened up a new avenue for his story.

"I've always really liked L. Ron Hubbard as a character, this much
larger-than-life character who was so inventive," Anderson says. "His
life was so incredibly packed full, like one day of his life seemed to
be years of somebody else's, and there's something sort of great about
that. At the time, I really didn't want to get into some number where
you're telling the L. Ron Hubbard story, but just sort of using it as a
springboard to go into another thing."

Fraught relationship

That
other thing turned out to be the story of the offbeat, fraught
relationship between Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd, a product not
just of a screenplay, but of Anderson's close collaboration with his
actors, a process of discovery for everyone involved, including
the filmmaker.

"I wouldn't say we ever really had it all
together," says Anderson. "It was like the most kind of movable script
I've ever gone into a film with, really not exactly sure what was going
to work, lot of bases covered and lots of possibilities out there, but
clearly like knowing there was a centerpiece with their first
processing thing."

"There's the first time they meet. There were
enough strong scenes like that along the way that we had mile markers,
but within that, there was so much liquid kind of searching and still
improvising and figuring it out that it made it kind of exciting not
to know."

The director also had the great pleasure of witnessing
two actors at the top of their craft burrow under their characters'
skin, becoming Freddie and Dodd as they navigated Anderson's complex
story. The accolades Phoenix and Hoffman are collecting are no surprise
to him.

"There is a middle scene, that was really like, for a
director, all you have to do is get two cameras and point them at them,
and you're not sure what - it's just like, hold on tight, there's so
much dialogue, so much back and forth, you just have to get out of the
way," Anderson says. "Just make sure the lights are on.

'As fast as you can'

"That
volume of pages, I think at some point, I think Phil said, 'You can't
even act this. You just have to go down a mountain as fast as you can
and hold on tight,' which is kind of great," he adds. "There's so much
to do, and you have to do it all. You actually can't throw any of your
ideas in there, you're just trying to remember it all and get through
it."